unironedman

Well the fine weather is here at last. It won’t actually. Last, that is. It rarely sticks around for long. But it’s here right now, and it’s glorious, and everything just feels better when the sun’s out. Maybe this is what it’s like to live by the Med?

Of course, being Irish, we go a bit mad when the sun comes out, and tend to strip off and get fried. Hence the lobster reference. Well, I am a bit long in the tooth for serious sunburn, but I do have a large forehead (as my Dad would say), so we still need to be mindful of that big ball of burning gas up there.

Tuesday: a decent run in the park, though the GPS on the iPhone threw a leg, and so all the stats bar the time were out. It’s an infrequent but regular occurrence, and when it happens, the map shows a straight line somewhere, when the chipset lost the signal, and so (usually), your run turns out to be a PB, until you cop the glitch in the system. When you run similar loops as I do, I don’t always need the phone app, to be honest; just a watch. And no doubt you could salvage some data from the map, as they can be uploaded onto the web end, and you can ‘do’ the run again, virtually, on screen, with all the attendant stats on speed and elevation. But anyway. Enough of that.

Wednesday: a 6k trail run with Mark in the morning. Not often we go mid-week, but this was a nice change. We doubled-back at one point to check up on a young lad (about 18) who was sitting by the river, in a uniform, with a bag. It just didn’t sit well with either of us. We had a chat with him and satisfied ourselves as much as we could that all was well, and left him to his own devices. He should have been in school. Maybe he was on the mitch.

Thursday: another lovely day, and we had a BA (breathing apparatus) exercise in head office, which means getting all your gear on, going under air, and wandering around inside a pitch black building with a fire inside somewhere. It’s what firemen do for kicks! But it was a very hot and sweaty job, and there was only one cure: a quick dip. Managed to slip off to the pool afterwards and get in a nippy 750m.

Friday: 35k on the bike in the morning. Time was short, so this was all I could manage. Enjoyable though. Later that evening, a did a 6k trail run.

Saturday: 9.75k run in the park. I GPS’d it which is why I know it was 9.75k. It’s a loop I do a fair bit. I like to call it the ‘not quite 10k loop’.

Lady’s Smock

Germander Speedwell

Cowslip